Software applications, such as Oracle® Human Capital Management (HCM) software, typically provide a user or administrator a user interface for assembling groups. For example, human resources personnel may wish to create a group of employees based on specific criteria such as title or department. Such a group is created by querying a human resources database using a query language comprising operands and comparative operators. In some cases these criteria can get very complex, and such query representations become hard to understand for the average user. Typically, applications have relied on tables that display each criterion as a row and one of the columns in the row (normally the first or the last one) acting as a connector between the different criterion (‘AND,’ ‘OR’ or ‘NOT’). If any type of nesting is needed, these user interfaces resort to the use of parentheses. At this point, the visual representation by means of a table is barely better than the SQL being created by the interface. For example, the query “(((Title=Manager) and (Department=Research)) or (Salary>$100,000))” becomes very difficult to read in plain format or tabular format because of the multiply-nested parentheses.